David Brin - Existence

… when a sudden shaft of brilliance gleamed, spearing him right through the contaict lens with a shrapnel-clutter of overlapping images-

– a planet of dark continents and narrows seas, conveyed in murky tans and grainy grays, except for a single, wavy band that flickered with detailed color, from azure seashore to snowcapped, purple peaks-

– a jumbled, jigsaw cityscape that stirred together a tangle of mud huts, skyscrapers, stilt houses, and gleaming domes, topped by thatched roofs-

– a crumpled mosaic of faces, jaggedly combining beaks and jaws and fluted stalks that, while twisted together unnaturally, seemed to snort and cry out with some kind of delirious urgency.

The impression lasted only a couple of seconds. Then it was gone. Benumbed with shock, Hamish sought refuge in logic. In scientific speculation.

That jumble of degraded images… mixed and overlapping chaotically… they could be remnants of holographic memory. Unlike the Havana Artifact, this one offers just a few surviving fragments, retained after the thing was damaged.

Perhaps by the primitive artists who used powders and stones to grind and polish it into a shape worthy of veneration, never knowing how much harm they were doing… or else even earlier, when the crystal came crashing to Earth.

Broken and ruined, unable to communicate clearly, perhaps it could only offer brief snatches of ambiguous confusion and dreamlike images. Enough to terrify our primitive ancestors with thoughts of death. Maybe inspiring other tribes to make their own crystal skulls, in vain efforts to duplicate its power. No wonder oligarchs like Rupert thought this too disturbing to share with the easily alarmed masses.

Hamish turned his attention to Glaucus-Worthington. To the unhappy look on the man’s face.

But didn’t Rupert just say something? That this showy display started only last night? Perhaps the skull never wakened-but for rare flickers-till a few hours ago.

Only… why now?

Hamish had no trouble coming up with a most likely hypothesis.

Oh my.

This is Tor-“Zep-girl”-Povlov, reporting to you from my new beat. Web-Eighteen, level Z12. The hippest, heppest hot-hit-hat… or not-this- that… in the Mesh. And, yes, I come before you as a purely-pearly virtue-virtual, wearing the nimbus halo of a holy-hollow holo. Hello? You expected, like, veri-real shots of the Heroine of Washing-tin? My current-realtime phys-visage?

Granny would say, as if! That cadaver-shell is just container-support. I live here now, in the Over-World. Pat this avatar on the back, I feel it. If I ever let one of you horny fans talk me into a back room privirtcy (or pervertcy), the sustainer pod’ll convey it. Nothing wrong with the old Tor’s hormonal system!

(Sure… like THAT’s going to happen! Still, you can keep offering.)

So yes, there’s still plenty of “me” left. And one thing I promise-I’ll never let my presence here run on aitopilot.

Tell you what. Help boost my ratings, and MediaCorp may spring for a more palp-able holvatar. Even one of those android-mobiles, I can send to chase down real-layer stories. Meanwhile, though, there’s plenty to occupy us here, in the Val-hall-levels, where citizen/amateur heroes like you can hunt iniquities, skewering lies with lances of transparency and light! Like we did, together, back on the old Spirit of Chula Vista.

So let’s get started.

What? Many of you want to hear about me, first? What it’s like to live this way?

Each year, hundreds of catastrophically injured people become gel-encased refugees, like me, who experience life through remote sensors, rather than organic eyes and flesh. Though the Mesh is home, we’re not “uploaded” cybernetic beings. Cams and sensors still feed old-fashioned nerve channels of a very wetbrain.

For some it’s a painful, limited life, that only fools would envy. Still, tens of thousands of normal, undamaged homosaps climb into hook-in tanks and risk body-atrophy, trying to follow us “pioneers” down the path of the living holvatar.

I hope none of you are such fools. Just one person in a hundred manages to make the transition as well as I have-swooping about the datalanes, veering from hunch to correlation to corroboration. Links that used to require a laborious eyeblink or tooth-click now happen by sheer will… or whim… quickly submerging to the level of reflex…

All right, I just made it sound attractive, didn’t I? Well, don’t go there, any of you. It still hurts! And there are puzzling itches, in the way data often seems to stroke my skin and tingle up the spine. None of the docs can explain. Then there’s the creepy sensation that someone’s calling my name . Not this moniker I use in the news biz. Not what my mother called me, but some kind of secret name, like in stories about magic spells and such.

Okay, it’s clearly a lingering wash of escapism/slash/self-pity… and so let’s push that aside with the balm of work! Smart-mob time. Like a swarm of T cells, let’s swoop onto something in the news!

What? You want to make the space Artifact our topic? All of you? Isn’t everybody else on the planet obsessing…

No, you’re right. Most of the reporting is stodgy. The insights stale. I share the group hunch. We can do better.

Peng Xiang Bin tried hard to follow the conversation-partly out of fascination. But also because he felt desperate to please.

If I prove useful to them-more than a mere on-off switch for the worldstone-it could mean my life. I might even get to see Mei Ling and Xiao En again.

That goal wasn’t coming easy. The others kept talking way over his head. Nor could he blame them. After all, who was he? What was he, but another piece of driftwood-trash, washed up on a beach, who happened to pick up a pretty rock? Should he demand they explain everything? Dui niu tanqin… it would be like playing a lute to a cow.

Except they needed his ongoing service as communicator-ambassador to the entity within that rock-and he seemed to be performing that task well enough. At least according to Dr. Nguyen, who was always friendly to Bin.

The tech-search experts-Anna Arroyo and Paul Menelaua-clearly were dubious about this ill-educated Huangpu shoresteader with his weathered skin and rough diction, who kept taking up valuable time with foolish questions. Those two would be happier, he knew, if the honor of direct contact with the Courier entity were taken over by someone else.

Only, can the role be passed along at all? If I died, would it transfer to another? Surely they had mulled that tempting thought.

Or do I have some special trait-something that goes beyond being the first man in decades to lay eyes on the worldstone? Without me, might there be a long search before they found another? That possibility was one he must foster. At some point it might keep him breathing.

Anyway, I do not have to prove myself their equal, Bin reminded himself. My role is like the first performer in a Chinese opera, who does not have to sing especially well. Just dance around a little and help warm up the audience. Be useful, not the star.

“Clearly, this mechanism in our possession was dispatched across interstellar space by different people, with different motives, than those who sent the Havana Artifact,” commented Yang Shenxiu, the scholar from New Beijing, who rested one hand on the worldstone without causing more than a ripple under its cloudy surface-giving Bin a moment of satisfaction. It reacts a lot more actively to my touch!